I think I’ll move this from IMHO to Great Debates.
I spent ten years in the local TV news business, the last five as a producer and Assistant News Director. Hung Mung makes some very good points in his post, but I must take exception to the one above. On the local level, “corporate interference” in news content is a myth. I have produced hundreds of newscasts for four television stations, all of them owned by major media corporations. Not once did I have a superior approach me and tell me to emphasize or deemphasize a story. Local news coverage is determined on a daily basis, beginning in the morning with the Assignment Editor who assigns stories to crews of reporters and photographers. There is a mid-day meeting where the producers of the evening newscast are told what stories are developing that day and they begin to plan their shows from there. Other content is taken from the network to fill out the newscast.
On the national level, there is some whoring done between corporate assets. ABC covering Disney, ESPN events covered on ABC, CBS doing things on other Viacom properties and other examples of corporate “synergy”.
As to the content itself, other posters have addressed the relevant factors. First of all, the people inside TV news really are giving the people what they want. What they want is determined through overnight ratings which give news executives immediate feedback and by focus groups and surveys. A lot of viewers today are dumbed down and seem to have shorter attention spans. The result is shorter stories and topics which don’t take too much work to understand. A few stations tried a “family friendly” format in the 90’s. No violence, more intellectual content. It crashed and burned because of low viewer interest. Viewers will constantly claim in focus groups and surveys not to like stereotypical “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage…and then turn right around and watch it with slack jawed awe.
Another culprit on the national level is the 24 hour news cycle. That’s why certain stories are hyped because they are thought to have “legs” or long term appeal. (Laci Peterson, the Jackson Trial, Natalee Holloway).
Lastly, talent is chosen these days for appearance and presentation rather than journalistic ability. It’s been that way since the 70’s. I’ve worked with some real idiots, but viewers seem to like them. You would be surprised at the number of people who choose to watch a station based simply on the personalities. That’s why anchors on stations down into the 50’s in market size can still make six figures.
Once upon a time the owners of the public airwaves encouraged TV station owners to carry news programming as an obligation to the public in exchanged for making great gobs of money. News was a money losing enterprise that brought prestige to a station.
Then some accountant realized news could make money, and shareholders realized they could get returns higher than 10 percent per annum. And things crept to their current state.
The “Dewey Defeats Truman” fuckup was an example of partisanship? I always thought it was an example of a botched attempt at a scoop.
Bingo.
Isn’t amazing how all that “important” news that the cable news channels bring us can be abondonded so that a reporter and camera crew can sit outside Neverland Ranch for 2 hours reporting nothing more than: “At any moment, we expect to see Michael Jackson emerge…”?
The news industry started hurting badly when the TV companies stopped looking at the news as a public service and started looking at it as a profit center.
It went on its deathbed the first time a producer adopted the concept of “If it bleeds, it leads”.
I agree. When you’ve got that much airtime, you’re practically obligated to go nuts over stories that don’t deserve it. The 24-hour news cycle and how it’s handled is also responsible for the bloviating “experts” and commentators we see on the news, analyzing and blathering about events before they’ve even happened.
Although that is probably one of the half dozen classic headlines of the 20th Century, it was, quite frankly, not due to media bias of any sort except self-feeding egotism.
The story is that all the polls throughout the summer and early fall had shown Dewey a clear winner over Truman; their only disagreement was in by how much. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Dixiecrats on the right and the Progressives on the left were splintered off from the Democrats, and likely to take far more Truman votes than Dewey votes in the eyes of all political observers. Among the things missed was the extent to which the rural vote (quite large in 1948) was supporting Truman, and how the polls generally were moving towards Truman in the last round of polls that were taken. Also not taken into account were a large population of people who were “safe Dewey voters” by the conventional wisdom but who actually secretly supported Truman. So every pollster, every political pundit, and 99% of editors were confident that the result of the election would be President Dewey (and Earl Warren as Vice President, which given the next decade’s events produces some interesting hypothetical questions).
At the time the paper (Tribune?) needed to go to press on election night for the next morning’s early edition, the election was still in doubt but the conventional wisdom was that Dewey would certainly win, the question being by how much. So they used the one thing they were sure of as the headline. Unfortunately… 
But it was not a case of political bias, but of journalists convincing each other of a
“certitude” which was not in fact true, and being certain that they knew better than anyone else.
For the newsies who have replied to this thread: I need some advice in this thread about how much to charge for a gig. Thanks in advance.
In this thread I described my first experience (yesterday) in live news coverage. It was a good experience in spite of the difficulties we had, which are detailed in the thread. The ‘lack of decorum’ that this thread is about did not occur yesterday. Nobody’s privacy was invaded. The network crew were very helpful and friendly.
[url=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=323926”]Fixing the link.
GAH!!!
I was just a neophyte journalism student in the mid-1970s, which is when I believe the death of dignity started to pick up speed.
The whole thing began with some struggling, third-place stations (notably KGO-TV in San Francisco) that had nothing to lose by trying a more sensationalistic approach than the successful but stuffy competition.
Around the same time, another station trying to struggle with a strike by its field camera crews tried something called “eyewitness news” where the reporters (who weren’t on strike) came into the studio and talked about what they reporting on, rather than showing pictures. That was soon corrupted into putting the reporter at the center of the story rather than being the off-camera narrator.
Finally, the development of lightweight, cheap video equipment meant that news directors could send a camera crew out to cover nearly anything, and get the footage on the air quickly, rather than using expensive film that took something like an hour to process and edit before it could be aired. Eventually, videotape meant a station didn’t even need a camera “crew.” One person could set everything up, then turn on the camera, stand in front of it and talk.
In the end, it was a combination of technology and desperation starting in the late 1960s. By about 1975, even stations in smaller cities could put all the pieces together and the race to the bottom was on.
I hear this a lot, but I can’t accept it. Around the world, every day, there are more important stories to be covered than you could possibly present on one channel, even running 24 hours a day.
This is US news we’re talking about. How often does ANY US news service cover anything but the most earthshattering events outside the borders? You listen to BBC World Service and CNN and wonder if they’re even reporting the same world.
Around the world, yes, but news networks don’t look to give the world equal time. Proximity is a big thing in news coverage. If something doesn’t take place near your viewers, the think is that they are less likely to care about it.
Yeah. I think that America: The Book has it pretty much down - in its media section he has a series of criteria to determine how newsworthy a story is, based on its subject (Baby of pop star placed in momentary danger > murder > theft, etc), the perpetator (Celebrity > Average Joe >> Journalist), and location (Third world country = not newsworthy).
I can barely stand the network and cable news. Local news is okay.
I saw a dicussion panal made up of most of the significant network and cable anchors.
Someone asked why the Daily show was so popular and they all had some insight.
ONe thing they left out was that the Daily show is popular is because tney can call bullshit for what it is out loud. They can show a clip or two and make a joke that says “isn’t that fucking ridiculous?” and we laugh because he’s right.
I’d love to see some real investigative journalism where someone seems to be committed to telling the truth and sifting the political bullshit from the truth. I really liked spinsanity.com but they sold out. I like fact check as well. We need something like that on the news. Not just inane repeating of talking points. When someone sputs some bogus facts then bust them front of the national audience. I saw Wes Clark do that during the campaign and I wanted to stand up and cheer. I felt the same when our Scottish freind reemed the Senate committee. Pick a current events issue and try to present the facts in a format that the average people can understand.
Maybe we’re changeing how things are done. I read in the column about the new show 30 days. Perhaps we need some shows that can provide interesting perspective that have information and entertainment.
I’ve learned more about Iraq by listening to real people who care than all the biased media put together.
I hope the OP will forgive my blasphemy against his “4th member of the Trinity”–Uncle Walter, but that old bastard was listed in the credits as the managing editor of a nightly newscast which, despite its “liberal” image , was anti- the American worker.
Uncle Walter’s 1970s daily “the way it is” carried biased story upon biased story arguing that the American worker was greedy, lazy, and slipshod and that foreign workers (mainly Japanese) were always frugal, virtuous , meticulous, and less materialistic.
Other newscasts picked up this thread and the Big Lie eventually led to a great national inferiority complex, and reventually the decline of US industry.
As Lee Iacocca observed, quality surveys taken in the late '80s/early 90s consistently ranked Japanese-branded autos from the then-joint-venture Chrysler/Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois much higher than the same cars from the same plant made by the same people that wee labelled Plymouth, Eagle, or Dodge.
That said, the state of TV news is deplorable.My local stations carry “health segments” that are really thinly-disguised ads for local plastic surgeons, dubious diet plans that are touted as superior because they are"doctor-supervised", latest techniques in laser eye jobs, and so on.
The writing on even network newscasts is deplorable, the delivery even worse. I’d rather watch old sitcoms on cable than this dreck. When I do succumb to some “breaking news” come-on and watch some of it, I don’t feel any better informed than if I’d just stuck with Seinfeld, Raymond, Frasier, or even The King of Queens for that 1/2 hour.
Yeah, that’s not too far off from what you might hear in journalism school.